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shminux comments on Normativity and Meta-Philosophy - Less Wrong
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Comments (55)
There is a "because" or "if" missing in the last two.
Let's also throw in the one from Eugene_Nier:
These shoulds are all different. The pebble sorting one is about fulfilling imperatives, the police informer one is about compliance with [unwritten] rules, the Newcomb one is about maximizing [someone's] utility, and I am not sure about the last. In any case, it seems like they describe or prescribe different metaethics.
That's why I mentioned it. It has an unconditional quality that Wei Dai's examples lack.
On your account, how does "You should one-box in Newcomb's problem [if you value money]" differ from "One-boxing on Newcomb's problem maximizes expected money"?
Relatedly, how does "We should kill that police informer and dump his body in the river [because that's what we do to traitors]" differ from "We kill traitors and their bodies in the river, and that police informer is a traitor"?
This isn't a rhetorical question; it seems to me that these sentences are different, but their differences have nothing to do with their propositional content.
The second statement is just a description of possible worlds, not a call to act. Same for the other one.
Cool. I agree. Given that, on what grounds do you unpack "You should one-box in Newcomb's problem" as "You should one-box in Newcomb's problem [if you value money]" rather than "You should [value money and therefore] one-box in Newcomb's problem"?
I suppose either interpretation is possible and should (ehm) be made explicit, which is what was missing from the OP, and was basically my point.
Ah, OK. I certainly agree that the statement in its conventional form is propositionally ambiguous.
My own sense is that "You should X" is primarily a call to action, roughly synonymous with "X!", and not really asserting a proposition at all, and trying to interpret it propositionally (by reading various "because"/"if"/etc. clauses into it) is already a mistake, akin to trying to decide what the referent of "it" is in the sentence "It is raining."
I see your point, I think. However, that's not how the OP treats it:
which is either/both asserting a proposition or/and taking action (of convincing someone to do something).
There is a big distinction between a statement about possible worlds ("is"), "should " and "do!", of course. In the OP's link it's discussed as normativity vs norm-relativity. Unfortunately, it has the standard philosophical shortcomings I alluded to in my other comment: it does not attempt to formalize it and instead goes into various historical descriptions and the differences of opinions between several equally confused schools, trying to swallow the whole thing instead of taking a careful manageable bite. Predictably, as a result, the whole thing gets retched back up undigested. Which is justified by calling it a "survey". Well, I am probably too harsh.
Fair enough. I took you as speaking more in your own voice, and less as adopting the OP's interpretive frame, than I think you meant to be. (To be clear, I fully endorse adopting the interpretive frame of a post while responding to it, I just misunderstood the extent to which you were doing so.)
Hmm, I thought I was speaking in my own voice, such as it is. In my instrumental approach "should" implies an attempt to manipulate outputs, specifically the ones leading to someone else's (modeled) outputs, not just a passive evaluation.